“May these stories invite you to engage with the world around us with greater attention and care.” Earthbound, an anthology which presents 12 stories from South Asia on the future of climate change, ends with the above words. It is an audacious hope, seeing that in its essence, this is the exact remit of some of the biggest annual international discussions that the world sees. The struggle against which this book and every effort against climate change sets themselves up is the mammoth inertia we have to ignore the biggest danger to our lives and home. Earthbound: Climate Stories from South Asia, Edited by Alina Gufran, The Storiculture Company, 2025.Climate change is snapping at our ankles and yet we only meditate on it when disaster strikes. It is an occupation that is relegated to the space between things. If we are not actively doubting it, we are happy to avoid it. An editor at a news website once told me that she does not ever include the words ‘climate change’ in a headline, because fewer people will click to read the article then. Last year, the main tent at the COP – the United Nations conference of countries to mitigate climate change – in Brazil, caught fire. It was quickly doused, but the fire’s metaphorical service continues. The world, our home, is ablaze. This anthology feeds off of this fire to deliver fiction that feels awfully like reality, in a way that makes it more visceral than a headline can.One of the ways in which it does this is to reduce the gigantic sweep of a world destroying itself to the dimension of the individual. Across stories, authors seem to say, ‘The flood that has reached your porch will swallow you, personally, along with the world.’ While climate mitigation is a community effort, the inward shift affected by the stories performs an immediate function of positing the reader in the thick of it as well. And why not? A world where the government posits its hairbrained and hardly-safe policies as a solution, where temporary bandaids assume the status of permanent ways out, and where ordinary citizens pay for extraordinary greed is eerily not the realm of the fantastic or the fictional, but of the here and now. The book, edited by Alina Gufran, opens with Prthvir Solanki’s ‘The Solution,’ where the government says that you can escape from a world where rising temperatures are leading to fires by…becoming fish. Haha, you think, until it strikes you that we beat utensils to get rid of a virus not very long ago. A story later, the events of Vijayta Lalwani’s ‘Kalypso Housing Society’ could well pass for a longform reported piece in an independent news website. The residents of a housing society suffer the consequences of misguided and unscientific water conservation efforts, and must reconcile with their changed appearances. In the midst of this, a reporter who sheds light on the situation goes missing.Across stories, men and women have no choice but to accept their fate, but Rimi B. Chatterjee’s ‘How Climate Town (Almost) Didn’t Begin’ highlights the most ignored in this field – climate scientists who are closest to the sites which are seeing the most change. Marketed as stories from South Asia, the anthology features one story which is obviously in Pakistan – Maliha Khan’s lively ‘If We Go To Hell, We’ll Take A Blanket First’. Non-Indian South Asian countries appear to largely have been given the miss. Perhaps it is difficult to argue for the geography of borders seeing that climate disasters know none. Also for an anthology set in South Asia, the homeground of caste division, there is little pointed acknowledgement of the fact that the climate crisis affects those who have the least the most. Across stories there is tacit acknowledgement that the poor are getting the worst deal out of this, but the victim-protagonists are almost always in positions of relative privilege. One of the stories that attempts to point to the facetiousness of victims in better social positions is Prashant Vaze’s ‘Hotel Wall’ in which a drought-stricken island’s villagers prepare to storm a luxury hotel hoarding water.In Venkataraghan Srinivasan’s ‘Sambar Kaveri’, a bombastic beginning – the Kaveri has become a river of sambar! – drives home the point of systemic rot quite deftly. In Rhea Lopez’s ‘Afterlife’, a woman resolves to stay back in a flooded world to protect her garden. There is necessary attention to the role of love – in Ayushi Dubey’s post-apocalypse, post-greed ‘Laila Ki Patang’, and in Sonal Sher’s ‘The Dolls’, which teeters on the brink of good old science fiction and accords aliens a degree of humanity. In all, Earthbound is essential reading. Its title and message is genius – we are bound by this earth, just as the crisis is bound for this earth. If there is a single story that reflects the ethos of this book and our times, then it is Kaihan Behramkamdin’s story ‘Strange Times’. We use this phrase – ‘strange times’ – easily because nothing else does justice to the phenomenon of a people killing their future, but it also puts the situation in a realm outside of our action. Homi, the protagonist, was happy to live life without much thought, so when things happen, he is largely paralysed. “Homi doesn’t know what will happen next but it doesn’t matter, the future isn’t real yet and for now, denial is good enough,” Behramkamdin writes. I don’t know if a line does more justice to our collective paralysis now.